Consumers have an ever-increasing array of options for consuming media content, in terms of the types of media content (e.g., video, games, audio, text, etc.), providers of the media content, and devices for consuming media content. Media content providers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and effective at providing media content quickly and reliably to consumers.
Some devices for consuming media content include immersive devices that can simulate a user's physical presence within a virtual reality (VR) environment. Image frames of the media content are typically encoded, which includes using compression algorithms to reduce the number of bits needed to transmit the image frames to a viewer's device where they are decoded for playback. An image frame can also be transformed from a two-dimensional plane to a three-dimensional projection space for display (e.g., a spherical projection space implementing the VR environment). Unfortunately, image frames are encoded based on their characteristics within the two-dimensional plane of the image frame and therefore are not optimized for the three-dimensional projection space.